Young Grandma, Old Hypocrite

Lauren Boebert Praises Son For Teen Pregnancy “Choice”

Today I rant. I still have a cold/cough like everyone else in my area where it’s 55 one day and snowing the next. Lauren Boebert is still a hypocrite. Mississippi lawmakers—who preside over a state that ranks dead last in health care—are still schmucks who don’t care about their constituents. And in Hollywood even friends of reproductive rights still make dumb mistakes when talking about contraception.

So, I rant.

Lauren Boebert Becomes a Grandmother at 36, Praises Her Son for Making the “Right” Choice

Lauren Boebert, the spitfire MAGA Republican Congresswoman from Colorado, announced last week—as she was accepting an award from Moms for America—that she is about to become a grandmother. She is 36. Boebert joked that when she pointed her young age out to her 17-year-old son (whose teenage girlfriend is 8 months pregnant), he reminded her that she’d made her own mother a grandma at 36. “It’s hereditary,” he said.

That’s not exactly how it works, Tyler. (Yes, his name is actually Tyler. No, he’s not the Tyler who thought there was Plan B in pregnancy tests, but clearly we have a Tyler thing going on here at Sex On Wednesday.)

I always hesitate to comment on situations like this, or at least to pour on the snark (despite how much Boebert—the former owner of a failed gun-themed restaurant called Shooters—inspires snark). For the most part I think the children of political figures should be off limits. They didn’t ask for the spotlight. As Claudia Conway (daughter of the now-divorcing Trump advisor Kellyanne and her Trump-hating husband George) taught us, it’s not easy to be in the political limelight and children do not always share the views of their parents.

It can also be hard to discuss the difficulties of teen parenting without vilifying teen parents themselves. Parenting is hard, and it can be harder to do it when you’re younger and do not have the resources needed. The statistics will tell us that teen parents are less likely to graduate from high school, and that the children of teen parents are more likely to drop out of high school, be incarcerated at some time during adolescence, give birth as a teenager, and face unemployment as a young adult. When discussing the topic, however, it’s important to separate the statistics from the stories of real young people who are working hard to raise children in what are often less-than-ideal circumstances.

Boebert—who once posed her four young sons in front of a Christmas tree, each holding a semi-automatic weapon—says she and her husband are excited to welcome this new grandchild. She added that the family will support her son and his unnamed girlfriend any way they can noting that she did not get this kind of support when she was a teen parent herself. That’s great. I honestly applaud her for helping her son.

Where she lost me, though, was when she started talking about the decision that her son made when faced with an unintended pregnancy:

“I am just very proud of both of them for being responsible for their situation. This is a huge responsibility they are taking on. They made the right choice. Nothing was forced on them. This is a decision they made on their own.”

Yes, folks, Lauren Boebert actually used the word choice!!!!

Here’s where her hypocrisy starts to show.

She let her son make his own decision while she’s actively working to take that decision out of the hands of pregnant women (young or old) by supporting abortion bans. Nothing was forced on them, but if Lauren—who has a 100% rating with the National Right to Life Committee—has her way, pregnancy decisions will be forced on other people’s sons and daughters.

She added that she was proud of conservative rural communities like hers “for valuing life.” She even noted that rural and urban areas tend to have similar teen pregnancy rates but lower rates of abortion. She got her facts right (congrats), but what she doesn’t explain is that values are only part of the picture.

People in conservative rural communities lack access to abortion services for reasons that are both political (conservative communities are in conservative states which have been chipping away at abortion rights for years) and logistical (people in rural areas often have to travel farther to access health care of any kind, but abortion in particular as many clinics in conservative states have closed).  

If Lauren Boebert is genuinely happy about becoming a grandmother and welcoming a new baby into the family, and her son and his girlfriend were genuinely not pressured into choosing to become parents, great. To once again quote my Bubbie, “gei gezinta hait” (go in good health). But she can’t praise her son for making a choice while voting to take that choice away from anyone who might make a different decision. The operative word here is choice.

Mississippi Lawmakers Prove They Don’t Care What Voters Want

Voters in Mississippi used to be able to put proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot and then, you know, vote on them. This process began in the 1990s but was ended in 2021 by the state Supreme Court over what seems like a technicality: the rule required an equal number of signatures from each of the state’s five congressional districts, but after the 2000 Census, the state only had four congressional districts. Now, proposed legislation would revive voter-initiated ballot measures (though these would be about laws, not constitutional amendments), but Republicans are working to ensure abortion issues can never be put to a popular vote.

Mississippi has some of the strictest abortion laws in the country and was the birthplace (bad pun?) of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Services case that officially usurped Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. It’s clear that lawmakers in the state want to restrict abortion, but when the voters were asked about this issue in 2011, they rejected a fetal personhood amendment which would have defined life as beginning at fertilization.

Perhaps this is why today’s Republican lawmakers admitted that they’re scared voters would use ballot initiatives to loosen abortion restrictions if given the chance. Their fear may have also been stoked by a July 2022 ACLU poll that found slightly more Mississippians opposed the Dobbs decision than supported it. Alternatively, they may have looked at recent ballot initiatives in other conservative states, like Kentucky, and realized that when given a choice people opt for more abortion rights.

So, instead of passing a neutral law that would allow for the will of the voters, House Constitution Chairman Fred Shanks (R-Brandon) added language to the new legislation preventing it from being used for issues around abortion. Now, that’s Democracy at work!

Seriously, if anything says, “we’re in charge, the voters don’t matter,” this is it.  

Another Special Episode of Grey’s Anatomy

I may be the only person still watching Grey’s Anatomy. I don’t even know why I still check in with the doctors at Grey-Sloan Memorial in this era of peak TV when I have so many other shows I could watch. I find the characters who are left kind of boring, and the drama feels more forced than ever. Yet I still watch.

A few months ago, I noted one Post-Roe episode in which the writers used a story about a high schooler who didn’t want her parents to know she was pregnant to give viewers step-by-step instructions on how to use mifepristone and misoprostol for a medication abortion. That was followed by another timely PSA… I mean episode… in which Drs. Bailey and Montgomery lose a patient with an ectopic pregnancy while trying to get her from an anti-abortion state to one in which they could perform the necessary surgery without the threat of jail time. 

The most recent abortion story focused on Sierra, an overworked mom of two who often solo-parents while her husband, a long-haul trucker, is on the road. She’s pregnant again and spotting (it’s unclear why she’s being seen by a surgical intern, but we’ll let that slide). She seems almost disappointed that she’s not having a miscarriage and tells the doctors that after each of her other pregnancies things got very emotionally dark. She hints at having been suicidal and says she’s not sure she could survive that again.

The doctors remind her that she’s only 11-weeks pregnant and could still have an abortion if she wanted. She opts for the procedure and is prepped and ready to go moments later with her husband on the phone. Dr. Wilson (who having changed specialties to obstetrics is at least the right provider for the job) talks the patient and the audience through the whole thing showing us all how easy it is.   

I’m happy that Shonda’s show-running successors are using their platform to educate people about abortion and challenge some stereotypes (like our patient, most women who have abortions are already mothers), but I do have a few notes. (Don’t worry, I’m not from the network.)

Sierra described what was clearly severe postpartum depression. I wish the doctors had noted that there are treatments for such depression and that if she did want to continue this pregnancy, a mental health provider could help her get through the months after birth without the darkness. Abortion was one option, but I wished they’d discussed others. (I know, I know, it’s a 42-minute show.)

The part of the interaction that was truly unrealistic was how fast Sierra accessed the procedure. The doctors mentioned it, she said yes, and they took her right away. We all wish our health care system worked like this, but it doesn’t, even in states like Washington where abortion is legal. Wait time for abortion appointments have gone up since the Supreme Court decision as there are now even fewer providers, and patients are often farther away.   

My biggest gripe, however, was with Sierra’s contraception backstory. She told the doctors that she didn’t like the way the birth control pill made her feel and that then the condom broke. This plays into common misconceptions about both methods: that hormones are bad for your body and condoms are unreliable. She repeated that last line “the condom broke” in the exasperated tone of someone who did the right thing but got an unfair result. This is a common refrain not just in television shows and movies that want to set up an unintended pregnancy but also in ads for emergency contraception put out by reproductive rights activists themselves.

I get it, we want our characters (or customers) to be blameless in their current plight so we’ll feel sorry for them and not angry when they get an abortion or take emergency contraception. Condoms are a good scapegoat because people think they break. Of course, people think they break because condoms are a good scapegoat. When used properly, condoms break very rarely. My favorite little-known stat about condoms is that if used perfectly, they have a 0.02 per condom failure rate.

So, here’s my note to the writer’s room: What if Sierra had said her doctor recommended against hormonal methods and they didn’t have a condom that night? Her husband is gone for weeks at a time, she could have said something about not seeing him in a long time and getting carried away. Same story, same result, no bad contraception information.

Too bad I’m not from the network.